Handling of product variety throughout the product life-cycle

Abstract

The handling of product variability throughout the complete product life-cycle is known to be a challenging task. With this work we aim to achieve an efficient and provably consistent way of managing the dynamic field of product variability of customer specific gearboxes within the development process of the ZF Friedrichshafen AG. This work starts with an overview and an analysis of the current methodology to handle product variability within the overall development processes. After identifying possible improvements with respect to the current product data management system, the realization of these improvements is outlined with the help of a formal specification and a "prover-based" analysis of product variability. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.